A series of photography capturing the essential, beautiful, and powerful life force that is water.
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Photo courtesy of MuuMuse.com
I’m rather tired of the media revering Lady Gaga’s performance art bravado and mindless exhibitionism. In a recently released interview with British music publication New Musical Express, M.I.A. revealed, in no uncertain terms, that she is fairly disgusted with the accolades Lady Gaga constantly receives. Though I share her sentiments, I would have augmented her statement to opine: “None of her music reflects how weird she so desperately tries to be or presently thinks she is. She models herself after Grace Jones and Madonna, but her musical catalog sounds like raucous and discordant Ibiza music.” Am I the only one who watches her endless, dizzying spectacles and feels utterly nauseous?
The 24-year-old dance-pop sibyl is such a work of entertainment engineering that giving her due as an artist brings with it a certain ruefulness, the sensation of being manipulated. Lady Gaga is so beyond any kind of embarrassment that she’s made mercantilism its own aesthetic. Not that I begrudge her the millions in album sales or the inevitable mantel full of Grammys, I just feel that the rampant obsession is overreaching.
She is the commodification of our own hysteria; the personification of her fans’ overrun imaginations and false realities. Lady Gaga is a product—her body and specter available for purchase and consumption through a range of media. Her music has taken a backseat to her visage. Her excellent voice, her classical training and her musical imaginativeness are all hindered by her vast inability to craft great songs.
The static notion of her celebrity is a figure of blind worship. Lady Gaga is the flywheel in an enormous piece of media-eating machinery. No other advert, print, video, blog or billboard has so thoroughly knitted itself into our consumerist culture. Ebola isn’t as viral. To all of her fans, she is an incendiary extravaganza of music, dance and performance art. I, however, fail to see why she is revered so highly as a pop musician when her music is sorely lacking.
Her performance constructs a constellation of ignorant ideologies. The temptation to deconstruct should be avoided. She embraces the sordidness of being a pop icon while making it part of her aesthetic. Though the media might laud her as being subversive and preeminent, I see her as being contrived and factitious. Just as Freud’s imposition of oedipal and hysterical narratives onto his patients did not yield tidy and conclusive results, the media’s exaggeration of Lady Gaga’s ostensible burlesque is far from the mark.
Read your pokerface? We can’t even see it any more under all that lace. Talent, she seems to say to her breathless female fans, is all well and good. But what it’s really all about is using your painted poker face to get yourself splashed onto TV screens.
Artifice, not music, is her chosen art form. Her admirers confer that it’s ironic. It’s postmodernistic. It’s Haus of Gaga, darling. Except that we’ve seen that conical bra before and thrilled at its subversiveness when Madonna wore it 20 years ago. A little pyrotechnics display tacked on just serves to emphasize its lack of cutting edge.
Photo courtesy of Collegian.psu.edu
Her message is crudely simplistic: that with the right amount of frightening self-belief and furious media savvy, ladies, you too can call yourself an artist while singing the lines: “We like boys in cars/ Boys, boys, boys buy us drinks in bars.” Lady Gaga properly demonstrates where being vacuous, incoherent and absent minded becomes a fashionable thing. Isn’t it rather ironic that she settled upon “Gaga” for her alias, as it is often the first sound emitted by babies when trying to imitate speech.
While Gaga continually reinvents her appearance, her music has been slow to evolve. Much has been made of her latest single, “Alejandro”, which sounds like a ripoff of Ace of Base’s 1993 hit, “Don’t Turn Around”. Its music video is a little too reminiscent of Madonna’s ’90s fare. It’s like walking by the neighborhood miscreant who is ranting and raving about how we’ll all be damned to hell while on your way to work. No need to stop and listen, he’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow. A shiny veneer is all well and good, but a well-built product beneath it is what will truly stand the test of time.
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Photo courtesy of JoanneHudson.com
WASARA truly offers the best in biodegradable tableware. The Tokyo-based company has a line of sculptural plates, bowls, tumblers and wine glasses made from a thin composite of bamboo, reed pulp and sugarcane fibers that looks and feels like something you’d find at Ted Muehling. And while WASARA is not a new line, their availability in North America is, exclusively through an online eco-chic San Francisco-based boutique.
Unlike other biodegradable tableware made from bagasse (sugarcane fiber), WASARA does not become pliable or “sweat” when hot liquids are added. The roundish plates ‘maru’ and the squarish plates ‘kaku’ have an integrated curve that ergonomically fits your hand. Boasting a strong Japanese aesthetic, the tableware was created with the intent of accentuating foods and drinks.
The use of WASARA products eliminates a dependency on traditional wood fiber-based materials used in disposable tableware. Since bagasse is traditionally burned for disposal, the diversion of the fiber into the making of tableware prevents harmful air pollution. After use, this product can be recycled for the making of paper, or 100% catabolized as compost.
These disposable dinnerware pieces are fully biodegradable and are designed for elegant entertaining, indoors or out. The collection is available online at Branch in a variety of quantities based upon your individual needs. For small events, there are retail packages of 6-12 pieces ($9-$12 per package) and, for larger events, bulk sleeves of 50-200 pieces ($40-$100). WASARA is as good to the earth as it is to your culinary creations.
Photo courtesy of BouncingRedBall.com
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Reckless extravagance has, for decades, provided an outward manifestation of American ambitions, impulses and aversion. In our own time, it has increasingly become an expression of domestic dysfunction—an attempt to manage or defer coming to terms with contradictions besetting the American way of life. Those contradictions have found their ultimate expression in the perpetual state of turbulence afflicting the United States today.
Gauging the implications of our veracious need for more requires that we acknowledge its source: It reflects the accumulated detritus of freedom, the by-products of our frantic pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
Freedom is the altar at which Americans worship, whatever our nominal religious persuasion. “No one sings odes to liberty as the final end of life with greater fervor than Americans,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed. In our public discourse, freedom is not so much a word or even a value as an incantation, its very mention is enough to stifle doubt and terminate all debate.
This heedless worship of freedom has been a mixed blessing. In our pursuit of freedom, we have accrued obligations and piled up debts that we are increasingly hard-pressed to meet. Freedom itself has undercut the nation’s ability to fulfill its commitments. We teeter precariously on the edge of insolvency, desperately trying to balance accounts by relying on our presumably invincible government.
Freedom is not static, nor is it necessarily benign. In practice, freedom constantly evolves and in doing so generates new requirements and abolishes old constraints. In many respects, Americans are freer today than ever before, with more citizens than ever before enjoying unencumbered access to the promise of American life.
Today no less than in 1776, a passion for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness remains at the center of America’s civic theology. The Jeffersonian trinity summarizes our common inheritance, defines our aspirations, and provides the touchstone for our influence abroad.
Yet if Americans still cherish the sentiments contained in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, we have over time radically revised our understanding of those “inalienable rights.” Today individual Americans use their freedom to do many worthy things. Some read, write, paint, sculpt, compose and perform music. Others build, restore, and preserve. Still others attend plays, concerts, and sporting events, visit their local multiplexes, IM each other incessantly, and join “communities” of the like-minded in an ever-growing array of social networking sites. They also pursue innumerable hobbies, worship, tithe, and in commendably large numbers, attend to the needs of the less fortunate. Yet none of these affairs exclusively defines what it means to be an American in the 21st century.
If one were to choose a single word to characterize that identity, it would have to be more. For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors. A bumper sticker, a sardonic motto and a charge dating from the age of Woodstock have recast the Jeffersonian trinity in modern vernacular: “Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.”
The reinterpretation of freedom has had a transformative impact on our society and culture. That transformation has produced a paradoxical legacy. As individuals, our appetites and expectations have grown exponentially. The collective capacity of our domestic economy to satisfy those appetites has not kept pace with demand. As a result, sustaining our pursuit of life, liberty and happiness at home requires increasingly that Americans look beyond our borders. Whether the issue at hand is oil, credit, or the availability of cheap consumer goods, we expect the world to accommodate the American way of life.
As America’s appetite for freedom has grown, so too has our penchant for empire. The connection between these two tendencies is a casual one. In an earlier age, Americans saw empire as the antithesis of freedom. Today, empire has seemingly become a prerequisite of freedom.
There is a further paradox: The actual exercise of American freedom is no longer conductive to generating the power required to establish and maintain an imperial order. If anything, the reverse is true: Centered on consumption and individual autonomy, the exercise of freedom is contributing to the gradual erosion of our national power. At precisely the moment when the ability to wield power has become the sine qua non for preserving American freedom, our reserves of power are being depleted.
American power has limits and is inadequate to the ambitions to which hubris and sanctimony have given rise. We need to reassert control over our own destiny, ending our condition of dependency and abandoning our imperial delusions. We, as individuals, must reexamine exactly what freedom entails so as to fulfill the dreams of our forefathers. The onus of responsibility falls squarely on the citizenry of this great nation.
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